This invention relates to a hand-operated home knitting machine and more particularly to a collapsible flat bed knitting machine in which the needle bed can be collapsed for facilitating transportation thereof.
In general, in a hand-operated home knitting machine, about 200 latch needles are juxtaposed on the needle bed at a constant pitch of about 4.5 mm. As a consequence, the needle bed may have an overall length in excess of 0.9 m thus causing difficulties in transportation of the hand knitting machine. Hence, collapsible flat bed knitting machines have been proposed in the art. In these conventional machines, the needle bed is divided into plural sections or parts which are connected together by hinge units that have horizontal axes parallel to the longitudinal direction of the latch needles. The respective needle bed parts may be turned about said horizontal axes and placed in vertically superposed relation to one another.
However, in such conventional hand knitting machine, the latch needles on the upper needle bed section are spaced apart from those on the lower needle bed section by distances larger than the needle pitch being equal to 4.5 mm. Thus the web mounted on the latch needles for knitting may be stretched when the needle bed is folded in the manner mentioned above, resulting in a warped or deformed fabric. Hence, the conventional machine of this type can be handled only with considerable difficulties because the web must be detached from the latch needles whenever the needle bed is collapsed for transporting the machine, and the web must be engaged again with the latch needles whenever the needle bed is straightened for restarting the knitting.